Daily Blessings

Hillel Broder's Daily Blessings draws its waters from the deep wells of the Talmud. But when these waters are filtered through Broder's limpid, airy, and lovely poetics, something luminous--ancient yet new, wondrous yet familiar, weighty yet buoyant-emerges. This is a wonderful book of poems! The product of a thoughtful and original mind curious about the past and the present.

-Yehoshua November, author of God's Optimism  (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry) and Two Worlds Exist (finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and Paterson Poetry Prize).  

Hillel Broder does not just write poetry about the Talmud; he also draws out the Talmud's poetry, finding lyricism amidst legality and re-setting the Talmud's rich images like precious gems in end-stopped lines of verse. "Offer a response / for every blessing," the Talmud teaches in Broder's rendering. With this volume, he has taken that charge to heart. A worthy companion for students and teachers of Talmud alike.

- Ilana Kurshan, author of If All the Seas Were Ink

In these Talmudic meditations, Dr. Hillel Broder has accomplished the seemingly impossible: the merging of the severity of the law with the serenity of the poem. Reading the ancient Talmudic texts with a deep attention to their hidden rhythm, Dr. Broder uncovers the poetic flow that rests at the heart of the mundane, and the spiritual cadence at the heart of the ordinary.

-Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld 

Embracing the freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness, we-could-wind-up-anywhere musings of luminaries such as Rav & Shmuel, Byron & Shelley, and Frog & Toad, Broder's meditations on each daf are both a journey and a destination in themselves. Like its source material, these poems embrace the connections between belief and sneezing, the culinary pleasures of this world and the spiritual pleasure of the World to Come, bringing the stories of the Gemara shockingly close, not just to the way we think, but the way we live.

-Matthue Roth, author, Yom Kippur a Go-Go and My First Kafka